Nine 1/2 Weeks (1986) on Netflix
Elizabeth McGraw works at a SoHo art gallery. She begins an affair with John Gray, a Wall Street arbitrageur she barely knows, who sees her only in the evenings.
- Netflix3.1/5
- IMDb5.9/1047,510 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes60%
Trailer
Plot summary
Elizabeth McGraw is rebuilding her life after a divorce, working at an upscale Manhattan gallery and still friendly with her ex-husband Bruce. Her coworker and closest friend Molly is far more preoccupied with sex than she is. When Elizabeth meets John Gray, a Wall Street arbitrageur, the attraction is instant. Wary after her divorce, she still agrees to see him after a grand gesture on his part, though she knows almost nothing about his life. He gives her an expensive gold watch and tells her that each day at noon she should picture his hands on her. John wants to see her only in the evenings, and as he tests her sexual limits, she weighs her attraction to him against how little he shares about himself.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Nine 1/2 Weeks (1986)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Adrian Lyne thought a studio film about sadomasochism was impossible, so he directed Flashdance in 1983 purely to persuade TriStar Pictures to greenlight this one. TriStar then walked away just before shooting, which Lyne blamed on pressure from its main shareholder, The Coca-Cola Company.
- Kim Basinger left her audition in tears after being made to act out the scene in which Elizabeth grovels on the floor for money, and told her agent she would never do the film. Two dozen roses arrived from Adrian Lyne and Mickey Rourke, and she changed her mind.
- Lyne banned rehearsals for Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke so that their characters' first encounter would also be the actors' first meeting in real life.
- Constant rows between Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke and Adrian Lyne pushed the New York shoot two weeks behind schedule and added $500,000 to the cost. Rourke argued the bad blood helped, making the on-screen conflict more convincing, and said Lyne even encouraged it.
- Lyne shot on monochromatic film with smoke machines and gray sets and costumes to fake the look of black and white, and hunted natural light at Trinity Church, Coney Island and the Chelsea Hotel. The New York Stock Exchange refused him access because of the film's content.
- After an X rating and bad test screenings, MGM cut three minutes from the American version. The scene in which John makes Elizabeth crawl for cash went because two-thirds of the test audience walked out of the theater; foreign prints kept it.
- Stewart Copeland was lined up to score the film until Geffen Records judged the script "offensive" and his involvement ended. The theme fell to Duran Duran bassist John Taylor, whose "I Do What I Do" was his first solo vocal and reached number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100.
- A flop at home, the film became an institution abroad: one Paris cinema ran it for five years, taking around $100 million, and the Cine Belas Artes in Sao Paulo played it for 30 months between 1986 and 1989.
